"
He utters the common feeling when he says that it were against nature.
But when a man has his choice between here and elsewhere, it may be
feared that the other world will seem too desperately far away to be
waited for when hungry ruin has him in the wind, and the chance on earth
is so temptingly near. Hence the notion of a transfer of allegiance from
God to Satan, sometimes by a written compact, sometimes with the ceremony
by which homage is done to a feudal superior.
Most of the practices of witchcraft--such as the power to raise storms,
to destroy cattle, to assume the shape of beasts by the use of certain
ointments, to induce deadly maladies in men by waxen images, or love by
means of charms and philtres--were inheritances from ancient paganism.
But the theory of a compact was the product of later times, the result,
no doubt, of the efforts of the clergy to inspire a horror of any lapse
into heathenish rites by making devils of all the old gods. Christianity
may be said to have invented the soul as an individual entity to be saved
or lost; and thus grosser wits were led to conceive of it as a piece of
property that could be transferred by deed of gift or sale, duly signed,
sealed, and witnessed. The earliest legend of the kind is that of
Theophilus, chancellor of the church of Adana in Cilicia some time during
the sixth century.
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